Musk’s formulation of “If you have a womb, you are a woman. Otherwise, you are not“, is the biological-determinist reduction that underpinned Nazi ideology about women.
The specific reduction of womanhood to a single organ, with rights of citizenship/identity derived only from reproductive capacity, is what Hitler used to do.
Nazism overtly made biological reproduction the definitional criterion for women’s social value. Hitler articulated this view most directly in a 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft), where he contrasted the “larger world” of men (state, struggle, willingness to die for community) with the “smaller world” of women (husband, family, children, home). He framed these as complementary “battlefields” by stating that for women, childbearing was the equivalent of men’s military sacrifice.
The regime’s position, like Musk today, was explicitly biological-determinist: a woman’s entire value in society was tied to their reproductive capacity. The Nazis manifested policies like the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross) medals awarded for bearing children, and the exclusion of women from professions, higher education, and political participation. The Lebensborn program flowed from womb-is-destiny framework, feeding into Lebensraum. The specific framing around the womb as definitional appeared in Nazi ideological texts more broadly. Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century was explicit about the biological essentialism that Musk now promotes.
Musk’s 13 words simply compress this flawed and historically inaccurate Nazi logic. If he were smarter he would have used 14 words.
Gender categories beyond biological sex are the human norm: Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa, Māhū in Hawaii, Muxe among the Zapotec, Kathoey in Thailand, the Bissu of Sulawesi, Mukhannathun in early Islamic Arabia, the Galli priests of ancient Rome. The womb-as-definition claim isn’t ancient wisdom, it’s twentieth-century fascism. Musk is promoting Nazi dog whistles as doctrine, and those nodding along are historically illiterate.
What’s really going on is Musk deadnaming his daughter and calling her identity a “tragic mental illness”, before invoking Nazism as why. He is calling her a failure in his master plan for a white nationalist concubine operation.
This is not a father making an abstract philosophical judgment about gender, he’s platforming hate speech to dehumanize his own child.
The fact that Musk recently posted that he does not believe Hitler, Stalin or Mao are responsible for deaths (because their “employees” were) shows that he does not take accountability for harms that he apparently intends to inflict against his own daughter.